Manor Lords' publisher explains why there's no price attached yet: 'we don’t want players to get scammed or cheated'

Medieval city-builder Manor Lords is Steam's most wishlisted game and is a mere day away from release, but no one is actually sure how much it's going to cost. 

Apparently, that's on purpose. Tim Bender, the CEO of Hooded Horse, Manor Lords' publisher, took to Reddit to explain the collective decision not to disclose the price until its launch day. "We don’t like to declare a price in advance of release," Bender says. "Because sharing the US price alone will lead to misunderstandings. People will be concluding the game is unaffordable in their region when at launch they will have pricing that will work for them." 

Manor Lords will have regional pricing but this won't just be for different currencies. Bender points out that it's really common for Steam to use US Dollar pricing in various regions like Turkey, Southeast Asia, and South America. However, these tend to differ from the North American price to help local customers afford the game, given wage differences and other factors. 

But that's not the only reason why Manor Lords doesn't have a price attached yet. "I also want to draw attention to another issue, and an important additional reason why we aren’t sharing the price publicly now—the rise of gray market/scam stores attempting to sell “pre-orders” on Manor Lords keys," Bender continues. "They don’t have any keys, and they aren’t going to be getting any from us. But they are attempting to capitalize on the hype, and, despite our stance that we are NOT doing pre-orders because we don’t want to take your money until after release, they are claiming to take pre-orders for key sales."

"They have no idea what the price will be, so they are taking their wild guesses and probably figuring they can get a key through some questionable means later (or just leave the customer not getting what they paid for if not perhaps). We don’t want players to get scammed or cheated by such sites, and giving them a definite price to plan around would probably just increase their proliferation and marketing of these ‘pre-orders’."

But even though you won't know how much it costs until launch day, while it doesn't sound like the cost will be too outrageous, you never know until you see it for yourself, so it's probably worth waiting to see before making any concrete decisions. "I don't think people should be worried about price," Bender says. "As a publisher, Hooded Horse has never done AAA pricing on a game. We have no current plans to do so, no matter how popular a game is… We're not trying to squeeze every last dollar out of people, we won't be putting up five editions with a spreadsheet needed to understand them or locking up content into Day 1 DLC or any of that crap. There's going to be a fair price there at launch with a fair discount." So, hopefully, this means that everyone will be able to enjoy Manor Lords for a fair price as soon as it releases, but as always, beware of scammers.